Do black women go through midlife crises? Shelby Freeman’s not sure, but the African-American wife and stepmom feels fat and is about to turn forty, and the itch from her seven-year marriage has developed into an irritating rash.

Bored with life in the sterile confines of extreme suburbia, she turns to journaling to sort through her mixed emotions about marriage, monogamy, career, and the elusive quest for motherhood. Soon, Shelby gets more excitement than she can handle when her journal entries, including her steamy fantasies about a sexy, younger coworker, start to mysteriously appear on the Internet.

Told entirely through journal entries, Shelby’s life goes from an “aging nice girl nobody” to a “fugitive from my own life,” when her journal goes viral and Shelby goes on the lam from the media onslaught, an angry husband, irate coworkers, family, friends and “journal junkies” who log on by the millions to take a peek inside her diary and her life.

I’m a Good Wife…Most of the Time author Dorothy Givens Terry says her own midlife career crisis prompted her to pen and self-publish her first novel in 2005. “If I am remembering correctly,” says Terry, “I had become extremely bored at work (and no, it was not at an education organization, like Shelby in the novel), and I began writing as a way to relieve the tedium.”

Terry recently refreshed the book and has launched it as an e-book on www.amazon.com. So what has changed? “I moved the time frame of the novel to the present, but the story’s overarching themes remain basically the same,” says Terry, “relationships, mainly, but also how the Internet can almost instantly give anyone their 15 minutes of fame, whether they want it or not!”

The book is written entirely as journal entries, in the spirit of “Bridget Jones’ Diary.” Over the span of a year, Shelby Freeman writes of her boredom in a marriage gone stale, her career stagnation, quirky co-workers, her wayward sister, her “angry teen” stepson and his free-spirited mother, her struggles with infertility and her growing attraction to a new, younger co-worker. The bulk of the journal entries mysteriously find their way to the Internet, goes viral and wreaks havoc on Shelby’s life. She runs away to escape the intrusion, but quickly finds out that, with the Internet, there is nowhere to hide!